Emil Gilels’ Russian/Soviet Repertoire

courtesy of Naxos of America

In June of 2018, this site discussed Profil’s release of its Emil Gilels Edition, a box of thirteen CDs accounting for recordings of performances by Russian pianist Emil Gilels made between 1933 and 1963. The cover design enumerated an impressive number of composers: Johann Sebastian Bach, Domenico Scarlatti, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert. While some may find this a rather limited scope of music history, the early recordings on the first CD include more recent composers, such as Claude Debussy and Francis Poulenc.

This past October Profil released a second box. This one is devoted entirely to composers that are either Russian or from countries that fell under the influence of the Soviet Union. The organization of the album is roughly chronological, with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at one end and Andrey Babaev (born in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1923 and died in Moscow in 1964) at the other. These recordings were made between 1940 and 1963.

Ironically, one of the high points of this collection involves music previously released on another label. Gilels made a few trio recordings with violinist Leonid Kogan and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. These recordings were anthologized in a five-CD box set released by DOREMI, which I discussed in August of 2017. The Profil release allowed me to revisit the recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Opus 50 trio in A minor and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 67 (second) trio in E minor; and listening to both of these offerings felt like encountering old friends. Indeed, the Shostakovich performance was so compelling that I was more than a little disappointed that the only other account of this composer involved three of the prelude-fugue couplings (in the keys of C major, D major, and D minor) from that composer’s Opus 87 set of all 24 major and minor keys.

Where concertos are concerned, three of them are accounted for by two different recordings. Most interesting is Tchaikovsky’s Opus 23 (first) concerto in B-flat minor, whose second recording was made with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and is included in the anthology of his RCA recordings. This is coupled on the same CD that begins with a performance of the same concerto made with Konstantin Ivanov conducting what is now known as the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra but was called the USSR State Radio Symphony Orchestra under Soviet rule.

I suspect that there are few listeners interested in playing this CD from beginning to end to experience two different performances back-to-back. However, the Opus 44 (second) concerto in G Major gets the same treatment. This time the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Kirill Kondrashin, best known for having conducted Van Cliburn’s prize-winning performance of Opus 23 at the first International Tchaikovsky Competition (which earned Kondrashin his own place in the catalog of RCA recordings). The second performance was recorded with the Hungarian National Philharmonic (then the Hungarian State Orchestra) conducted by András Kóródi. The other concerto to get two recordings is Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 30 (third) concerto in D minor. Both of them were again made with Kondrashin and the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra.

My primary disappointment involves an unsatisfying limited account of piano sonatas. Only one of Sergei Prokofiev’s “war” sonatas, Opus 84 in B-flat major, is included. There are only two other Prokofiev sonatas included, the Opus 14 (second) in D minor and two recordings of the Opus 28 (third) in A minor. Even more disappointing is that Alexander Scriabin is represented by only two very early sonatas, Opus 6 (first) in F minor and Opus 30 (fourth) in F-sharp major. The latter comes from the time when Scriabin was still experimenting with rich chromaticism, not yet ready to pursue the potential of atonality.

In many ways the assortment in this collection reminds us of just how conservative prevailing tastes were during the middle of the twentieth century. Shostakovich knew how to think “out of the box;” but that tended to provoke Soviet authorities into confining him within a stronger box. His colleague Mieczysław Weinberg could be similarly adventurous and probably took advantage of how few people knew about his compositions. Fortunately, his Opus 56 (fourth) piano sonata in B minor is included in this Gilels collection. Mind you, conditions in the United States tended to be just as conservative, allowing repertoire to be determined by balance sheets and the prices of shares on stock exchanges!

The bottom line is that there is a generous supply of piano-playing talent that is far better than merely satisfactory in this collection. If Gilels was limited by the narrowness of public opinion, he was far from the only performing artist to be so confined. Better we should simply enjoy the expressiveness he could bring to the compositions he was allowed to perform.